“Although he had certain talents as a musician and a composer, he lacked the charisma or showmanship or whatever it was that made a performer stand out”

“Formerly, in my attempts to isolate this talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I heard, the part itself, a part, the common property of all the actresses who appeared as Phèdre, which I myself had studied beforehand so that I might be capable of subtracting it, of gleaming as a residuum Mme Berma’s talent alone. But this talent which I sought to discover outside the part itself was indissolubly one with it. So with a great musician (it appears that this was the case with Vinteuil when he played the piano), his playing is that of so fine a pianist that one is no longer aware that the performer is a pianist at all, because his playing has become so transparent, so imbued with what he is interpreting, that one no longer sees the performer himself — he is simply a window opening upon a great work of art.”

“Whatever it was, he thought, whatever the strain and the agony, they were worth it, because they had made him reach this day”

“If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist. ”

“Whatever he had found, it made him a better person. Maybe that's what love was, finding the person who brings out the best in you and eliminates the worst.”

“He was "a magician, a magician in the sense that he took what was given and simply forced the conclusions logically out of it, whether it was algebra, geometry, or whatever. He had some way of forcing out the results that made him different from the rest of the people." Israel Halperin about von Neumann”